Speakers

Alexei Levene hails from London, UK and is a graduate in Philosophy and Law.

Alexei Levene

Co Founder at Desolenator

Alexei Levene hails from London, UK and is a graduate in Philosophy and Law. With an early career in business development and sales roles in the supply chain technology, Alexei later set up an innovation strategy business based in Paris working with clients such as Shell and Philips. Later Alexei co-founded an award winning crowdfunding platform for renewable energy in the UK.

Alexei will be talking about his North Star and what he's doing to reach it.

"Change is aligning your focus, energy, and time with other like-minded people to become an unstoppable force."

Jillian Kowalchuk

Jillian is an entrepreneur and public health professional and with experience in HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health and education. Master of Science in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, fieldwork in both developing and developed countries, wide-ranging experience as a researcher, evaluator, program implementer and technical writer. Expertise across both public and private sectors.

Jillian has experience working directly with vulnerable groups in various capacities including campaign design, implementation, coordination, and research. Jillian is able to condense difficult concepts and datasets into easily digestible formats to mobilise innovation and change at a scale needed to respond to public health and safety issues.

Jillian holds a Master of Science degree in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in addition to a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Alberta.

Bree will be talking about change and how your organisation can not only survive it, but get good at it.

Bree Groff

CEO of Nobl Collective

Bree will be this year's Opus keynote, after a fantastic presentation in San Diego we had to bring her over to London! With a wealth of experience in innovation consulting she's now running a global change agency. Bree's had the great fortune of working with ambitious and empathetic leaders, helping their teams to not only survive change, but get good at it.

NOBL (pronounced no-bell) was founded in 2014 to help leaders make change. Today they are a global change agency, training organizations to embrace new attitudes and adopt new behaviors. Their work is at it's most meaningful when our partners grow to their full potential, when they are freed to truly serve their customers and constituents, and when their impact on the world becomes powerful and profound.

Davinia is a Marketing and business development expert with 15 years experience within the investment management and professional services industries.

Davinia Tomlinson

Co Founder & CEO at rainchq

rainchq is the brainchild of CEO & co-founder, Davinia Tomlinson who over the course of her career in marketing both mainstream and alternative investments asked herself one big question: why don't more women invest in these?

rainchq is on a mission to promote financial inclusion for women through exclusivity - after all, you wouldn't expect a generalist to understand your specialist needs. The numbers speak for themselves: despite outliving men, women typically save three times less. But they aren't given the right platform to invest.

Davinia will be talking about her North Star and what she's doing to reach it.

Justin will be talking about hurdles and how to turn them into opportunities.

Justin Roux

Managing Director of Shift Actions

Justin's worked in both in-house and consultancy roles in B2B, B2C, Private Equity and M&A. He has an extensive international exposure and therefore understanding of different cultures, working with international teams, and delivering programmes that are transferrable across demographics, cultures and geographies.

His experience covers both the insides and the outsides of companies. Sure, it's essential to have a hard-working front-end experience - making connections and relationships among customers, suppliers, investors and bystanders - but internally it's essential to build a structure and culture to support the change and growth. Many strategies don't achieve their full potential because they don't dock into the organisation well (or vice versa).

Justin knows a thing or two about hurdles and how your business can use them to create advantages.

Nikita Gicanda Vervelde

Nikita is the Director at JV&Partners

Nikita's career has crossed two sectors: Angel Investing & Tech Recruitment. She considers herself exclusively an 'Adult Third Culture Kid', having grown up in 7 different countries. In recent years she's become increasingly fascinated by the entrepreneurial spirit, the investors that fund successful businesses, and the burgeoning tech community.

She now spends her time as our Director helping build burgeoning tech Startups and SMEs. These experiences and having invested in 8 start-ups have cultivated her understanding of the business world, its challenges, and what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, as an investor, and as an employee.

Nikita will be talking about her North Star and what she's doing to reach it.

Preston is an innovation and technical lead, developer evangelist, product strategist, project manager, researcher and writer. He's been making websites for 17 years.

Preston So

Director of Research and Innovation

Preston is a frequent presenter with 10 years of speaking experience at over 50 conferences, including SXSW Interactive (2017, 2018), and keynotes at conferences on four continents in multiple languages.

Tony Markovski

Director of Innovation at Plexal

Tony has 15 years of experience helping organisations plan, architect and deploy emerging technologies and ideas that drive business transformation, innovation and new leadership required for the 21st century.

He has created and led agile, collaborative and purpose-driven teams in hyper-growth, disruptive digital start-ups, as well as in global, well-established Fortune 50 companies with a strong focus on change, growth and people.

Tony held leading positions at Google, Adobe, WPP and Bazaarvoice and is currently the Director of Innovation at Plexal, Europe's leading hub for next generation innovation services.

Bianca Packham

Founder & CEO at Weekender

A former writer, designer, lecturer, curator and archivist with a passion for culture and storytelling, Bianca brings her creative background to the tech sector for the first time as the founder and CEO of Weekender.

Using an AI-powered recommendation engine, messaging apps and home assistant technology, Weekender learns travellers' preferences to recommend where, when and how they will travel next and what to do when they get there. The product of a lifelong quest to make new cultural experiences more accessible, Bianca's vision for Weekender is to streamline travel planning so people can spend more time exploring, discovering and learning.

Bianca will be talking about her North Star and what she's doing to reach it.

Simon McCalla

CTO of Nominet

Simon, technologist – fascinated by the potential that the internet and technology brings to how we live our lives and run our businesses. He works as the CTO for Nominet – the organisation that manages and runs the Domain Name System behind the 10.5 million .uk domains and provides registry and technology services to over 40 generic top level domains, UK government and large global enterprises.

Stephen has been pioneering the use of technology as a tool for learning for almost twenty years.

Stephen Reid

As Director of Immersive Minds Stephen has been pioneering the use of technology as a tool for learning for almost twenty years. He's dedicated his career to exploring, piloting and advocating the use of technology from the early adoption of podcasting, animation and film-making to more recent 3D printing, virtual reality, the maker movement and games-based learning. He works with schools, museums, galleries, charities, businesses and government organisations in 65 countries around the world. Stephen leads the Immersive Minds team of educators, coders and builders in creating innovative, transformative learning experiences and resources for all.

Despite a lean towards technology as a preferred learning tool, the main focus of his work is always on people. Connecting and working with people is the most important part of my day. So please, get in touch and connect with me, there is so much more we can do together.